The Existential Crisis of NaN: We Are Not the Same

Description

This meme features the character Gustavo 'Gus' Fring from the TV series Breaking Bad, portrayed by actor Giancarlo Esposito. He is shown in a sharp grey suit, adjusting his tie with a stern, confident expression, set against a yellow and black background. This image is the basis for the popular 'We Are Not the Same' meme format. Overlaid on the image in white text is the phrase: 'I am NaN, You are NaN, We are not the same.' The humor is deeply technical, referencing a fundamental property of the 'Not a Number' (NaN) value in IEEE 754 floating-point arithmetic, which is used in virtually all modern programming languages. A defining and often counter-intuitive characteristic of NaN is that it is not equal to any value, including itself. Therefore, a comparison like `NaN == NaN` or `NaN === NaN` will always evaluate to false. The meme creates a clever, multi-layered joke by applying this strict programming rule to the meme's punchline about social superiority, making a statement that is both absurd and technically correct

Common Tags

Javascript FloatingPointArithmetic LanguageQuirks LanguageGotchas CodingHumor DeveloperHumor CSFundamentals

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick NaN is the principal engineer of data types: it follows no rules but its own and considers itself unequal to all peers, especially itself

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

NaN is the principal engineer of data types: it follows no rules but its own and considers itself unequal to all peers, especially itself
Anonymous

NaN !== NaN is just IEEE-754’s way of reminding us that even in maths, distributed consensus is hard
Anonymous

After 20 years in this industry, I've learned that NaN !== NaN is just JavaScript's way of teaching us that even in mathematics, identity is a social construct - which explains why half our microservices can't agree on what a user ID should look like
Anonymous

This meme perfectly captures JavaScript's philosophical crisis: NaN is the only value in the language that practices radical individualism - it refuses to be equal to itself. While mathematicians defined NaN this way in IEEE 754 to handle undefined operations, JavaScript developers have been debugging `if (x === NaN)` checks for decades. The real kicker? You need `Number.isNaN()` or the old `isNaN()` to actually detect it, because apparently JavaScript believes in 'show, don't tell' - except when it comes to NaN, where it just lies to your face about equality
Anonymous

IEEE‑754 said NaN != NaN; JavaScript shipped === to honor it, then added Object.is and SameValueZero so product could pretend it never happened
Anonymous

NaN's eternal flex: unique even to itself, forcing isNaN() just to confirm the denial
Anonymous

IEEE‑754 logic: I’m NaN, you’re NaN - === says we’re not the same; Object.is says we are. Choose your equality semantics before the postmortem
@Alivali 4y

Didn't get! js bugs?
1. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  no, NaN and NaN are never equal - well, at least in js and python, but I do think that this design desicion actually makes sense.
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  lmao in python: nan==nan → False (equality check) nan is nan → True (identity check)
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  so NaNs in python aren't equal, but they are the same.
  
  @Agent1378 4y
  
  Sounds like plsql
  
  @CcxCZ 4y
  
  IEEE-754 Floating point standard requires them not to be equal. But generally in languages with exceptions you'd use signalling NaN instead of silent NaN, meaning you wouldn't get it as value but rather as a computation error.